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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

This Is Law

Is being colorblind worse than being racist?

I wondered that recently.

Is believing that race is not a factor, or not a large factor in the way the world works as bad as actively practicing racism?

I can't decide. I do know that dealing with colorblind people is just as frustrating as dealing with a racist. Dealing with someone who actively denies reality, the reality that obviously exists based on objective facts, is just as frustrating as dealing with someone who is actively working to benefit one racial group over another.

I don't care if they have good intentions. I don't care if they are nice people. Their refusal to deal with reality, to acknowledge and handle the problems that exist in this world is dangerous. It's danger to me, it's a danger to my family and it's a danger to any thinking person seeking to improve the world around them.

6 comments:

Bill
said...

I believe one of the most troubling and dangerous aspect of what you just wrote about in your column is when a black person does it. I really don’t know why some blacks do this. I know why other various ethnic groups do it.

Color blindness is a myth. No such thing. How can a person be color blind? The human brain is set up to point out the differences in nature and extrapolate on those differences to come to a certain conclusion. Mainly that we do not look like each other. Then it adds everything that it knows or has experience or read about this "different" person and shifts it up to the conscience part of the brain to be filtered and sorted. And it is, depending on that persons ethnic, social and releigous background and general beliefs. And a decision is made. Namely, do I or don't I like this person I am talking to. IMO there are only two groups of people in this world: white people, black people, red people, brown people and yellow people. And then there are human beings.

Fascinating question, one I never considered. Me think being color blind is on the same level as being a racist. I believe it’s the person claiming to be colorblind who actually enables the racist. You enable racism when you fail to call out blatant acts of racism, preferring to identify those acts as class or gender related, while totally ignoring the racial component. To be colorblind is to ignore the racial disparities that exist in our society, it’s to ignore the racial preference that whites have long enjoyed, and the lengths they will undertake to maintain their preferential racial status. To be colorblind is to dismiss the social racial dynamics that have played out over the decades, that have produced the afore mentioned disparities. To wear the blinders is to accept the status quo.

I get what the person is saying when they claim to be colorblind, and they may very well be colorblind in how they conduct their social interactions, however they rarely make the leap to identify as an ally of the anti-racist. To be anti-racist is to give up the colorblind charade.

I’ve been around a few brothers and sisters and other non-whites who have claimed to be colorblind, my observation is that’s the price of admission into the honorary white fraternity.

Being 'colour-blind' has come to mean denying that past and present racist practices have a significant influence on people's lives. There's a (poorly) hidden implicit claim in that denial -- that the current state of affairs is 'natural'.

Believing that the vast disparities between white people and people of colour with regards to wealth, income, levels of incarceration and so on are 'natural' is, in my book, plainly racist.

I think, though, that the meaning of 'colour-blind' may have shifted and been subverted over time. I'm not sure if it's always meant this kind of denial.

[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.